Shadow Networks

Shadow Networks is a tour de force. This wonderful book by Francisco Louçã and Michael Ash gives us a fascinating global view of the of the underlying forces, people, and financial institutions that generate massive wealth at the top and instability and insecurity for many of the rest of us. With numerous entertaining vignettes of the people in power, from bankers to politicians to economists, Louçã and Ash weave the destructive texture of our global financial system, but manage to bring it down to the human level. Rigorous yet lively and easy to read, Shadow Networks will be a great text for students that want to understand the financial mess we are in, and anyone who wants to chart a new, more stable and egalitarian course forward. * Gerald Epstein, Professor of Economics and Co-Director, Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), University of Massachusetts Amherst, US *
That the world has financialized is not news. We live, as a famous newspaper has it, "in Financial Times. But we tend to see only one aspect of financialization - the bit that we can sometimes count - the bit that goes bust with depressing regularity - the shadow banking system. What we miss is hidden in the shadows. The intellectual and political networks that sustain and nurture financialization as a social and political project. In this work Louçã and Ash seek to bring into the light those forces that would prefer to stay in the shadows. * Mark Blyth, Eastman Professor of Political Economy, The Watson Institute for International Affairs, Brown University *